The roots of Toshiba’s admission this week that it has serious doubts over its “ability to continue as a going concern” can be found near two small US towns.

It is the four reactors being built for nuclear power stations outside Waynesboro, in Georgia, and Jenkinsville, South Carolina, by the company’s US subsidiary Westinghouse that have left the Japanese corporation facing an annual loss of £7.37bn.

Construction work on the units has run hugely over budget and over schedule, casting a shadow over two of the biggest new nuclear power station projects in the US for years.

Meanwhile the utility company paying for the Virgil C Summer Nuclear Generating Station, near Jenkinsville, South Carolina, warned this week that abandonment of the project was one of the options it was now considering.

[…]

EDF, the French state-owned company which has started pouring concrete at Hinkley Point in Somerset, where it plans to have two reactors operational by 2025, maintains it has had plenty of recent practice.

The EPR reactor design for Hinkley is the same as that for the reactors it is building in Finland, and at Flamanville, in France, though both of those are running late and over budget

However, any rescue by Seoul is far from certain. The two leading candidates in South Korea’s elections in May said this week that they favoured rowing back on nuclear power and switching to renewable energy. Kepco would also face a regulatory delay of several years if it wanted to use its own technology at Moorside.

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The Atomic Age is an ongoing project that aims to cultivate critical and reflective intervention regarding nuclear power and weapons. We provide daily news updates on the issues of nuclear energy and weapons, primarily though not exclusively in English and Japanese via RSS, Twitter, and Facebook. If you would like to receive updates in English only, subscribe to this RSS.

Additional Notes / 謝辞

The artwork in the header, titled "JAPAN:Nuclear Power Plant," is copyright artist Tomiyama Taeko.

The photograph in the sidebar, of a nuclear power plant in Byron, Illinois, is copyright photographer Joseph Pobereskin (http://pobereskin.com/)

This website was designed by the Center for East Asian Studies, the University of Chicago, and is administered by Masaki Matsumoto, Graduate Student in the Masters of Arts Program for the Social Sciences, the University of Chicago.

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